Oh, duck

© Basil Lee 2013

Flatlined in your poisoned duck pond, dodgy for swimming humans, and now paddling rubber duckies too.

Were you depressed because your soul had been snatched by a million souls taking your picture, flashing their mobiles in callous adoration, uploading your short life to squees by a million others, then turning their backs on you?

Did your feverish dreams already come crashing down when you realised you were pinned to a single spot under a soggy sun?

Or did lame duck jokes and their ilk get too much to bear, like the weight of all the corn in the world?

Leave all this nonsense to the quacks. Let’s go stuff all the rubbish in the Great Pacific garbage patch into giant rubber duckies like you but not like you (really rubbery tough guys, unlike, say, deflatable ducks), and make the world a better place. Or at least a better duck pond.

Can I get a hey, man?

So if someone told me that a Certain Busy Gentleman (CBG) in the civil service “was instrumental in bringing” a Contentious Industry (CI, which naughtier people might term Christians-Say-No, or CSNo-means-no) into my little corner of the world, and then that CBG left his glittering governmental portfolio, and was ”appointed as a senior executive” at one of only two CI companies that won the bid to set up shop here, then is it not justifiable that my Radar of Wild Suspicion (RWS) starts pinging?

Especially if the news is buried on page 8 of the Home section in the state newspaper (dated 30 April 2013)?

Ping away, my pretty, ping away! Even though you’re making me very uncomfortable! Ping, pong!

Mr Goh Chye Boon, 43, is slated to take over as chief executive officer of RWS, according to sources. …

A former member of the elite Administrative Service …

He chaired the Government’s Integrated Resort Working Group in 2007. He also oversaw the rolling out of the first Formula One night race in 2008, when he was deputy secretary for special projects in the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

… he joined the company on Jan 28 this year as executive vice-president of resort operations.

An imagination redeemed

Does this happen to you too? Wandering about your life doing this or that, a thought suddenly strikes and the view before you shifts, ever so slightly, to your inner world — who am I? Really, who am I? This person walking, talking, living, breathing right here and now — why? Hollow, empty, a cold cavern, an echo chamber eked out by the attrition of the years. Who am I?

I’d been thinking recently that I’m much better than before, only by the grace of God — the Holy Spirit who indwells in me has been renewing my metaphorical insides, despite my best attempts to hamper the work of sanctification. When the shift happens, it’s no longer a chill but warmth that greets me, a knowing that I am more of the self that I’ve been created to be than I was a year ago or the day before.

But this vessel being purified gets covered by rough seas. The issues that bubble up, oy. Obsession. Perversity. Idolatry. They have left their marks on me. And I expect and already see more of my wretchedness surfacing. Pride. Laziness. Callousness. I have left my marks on others. I’m learning to be sorry, my friends. To guard my mind. Mind my tongue. Watch my stinking attitude.

Assurance matters. Grace fetters. Knowing ever more what you’re saved from and living out what you’re saved for — these are not dainty words to help you digest your daily burnt toast.

Tonight I got to sit at the proverbial feet of Michael Card, a man serious about joy, and a follower of Christ for 48 years. Forty-eight years! Ah, but the days would be worth the journey if your love grows. I admit that for me his records are a bit tiring to listen to at a stretch — but tonight, as we had the pleasure of being led in song and instructed in truth by the dear Holy Spirit working through him, I got to taste why music, and Word, and words, and pictures, are best received in a unity of distinctions, a community.

Well, enough thoughts sploshing from this muddy well for a while. My imagination has yet to stretch to how I am going to finish all my homework on time (all I know is it’s going to involve a continual posture of helpless surrender). I leave you with what Card (who by the way was so gracious as to walk around chatting with all and sundry, with no airs at all) singled out as his favourite composition, and invited us to sing along to, a balm for anyone who had to return to a place of loneliness tonight — a balm for me too, as I remembered how much the Lord has done and is doing for me, most of all in facing who I am and who I have been:

Come Life Up Your Sorrows

If you are wounded, and if you’re alone
If you are angry, if your heart is cold as stone
If you have fallen, and if you are weak
Come find the worth of God that only the suffering seek

Come lift up your sorrows, and offer your pain
Come make a sacrifice, of all your shame
There in your wilderness, he’s waiting for you
To worship him with your wounds, for he’s wounded too

He has not stuttered, and he has not lied
When he said, “Come unto me”, you’re not disqualified
When you’re heavy-laden, you may want to depart
But those who know sorrow, they’re closest to his heart

Come lift up your sorrows, and offer your pain
Come make a sacrifice, of all your shame
There in your wilderness, he’s waiting for you
To worship him with your wounds, for he’s wounded too

In this most holy place, he’s made a sacred space
Those who will enter in, and trust to cry out to him
And you’ll find no curtain there, no reason left for fear
There’s perfect freedom here, to weep every unwept tear

Come lift up your sorrows, and offer your pain
Come make a sacrifice, of all your shame
There in your wilderness, he’s waiting for you
To worship him with your wounds, for he’s wounded too

Noted with thanks

Today we heard in chapel that a heart that knows love is a heart that knows gratitude. So I thought it would be good to note down the love I have received today, as a way of giving thanks for:

1. My Hebrew teacher generously rescheduling a test for me, and then choosing to be reassuring instead of condemning when I confessed to doing poorly in it — then my Hermeneutics teacher wisely encouraging me to give myself grace, especially since life in the ministry is going to be a life of receiving criticism. Teachers who don’t only make a libation of their minds, but also their hearts (pardon the dualism).

2. Schoolmates, staff and teachers pouring in their efforts and talents to make chapel a fragrant offering unto the Lord — the beauty of song, the bounty of the Word, the business of administration.

3. My classmates making time to listen and encourage and confide and pray together, whether over snacks or lunch or afternoon teh tarik.

4. Little acts of service and kindness from family and friends, whether it’s preparing a meal, or conveying a message, or taking a photo, or guarding a bag, or commuting together, or sharing a smile, a laugh, a nod or a sigh.

Today we also heard in class that ‘longsuffering’ in the Greek includes the idea of bearing with the inadequacies of others. Somehow defining patience in this way made a world of difference to me. I have so much hesitation about the expectation of having to love love love loooooove people, especially since they and I can be so trying on the nerves. It is heartening and helpful to know it’s not about my way or the highway, but the Jesus way as the only way to life together in the shape of eternity.

I feel much released from the heaviness of the night before. God has placed me in a community, and within that, little communities, where I can be various degrees of my naturally anxious self, and learn about myself in terms of ourselves. That we can blossom anyway when we let our petals and tendrils and leafy bits be held up by the petals and tendrils and leafy bits — and even the thorns — of everyone around us. That we can bloom in all sorts of complex directions and patterns if only we keep our hearts rooted in purity. That it’s not about being a stick-in-the-mud, but about desiring deeper, better, truer than what only leads to loneliness or blame or despair.

I am grateful. For the love I have received, the love I am learning to give, and the love that awaits amidst the agony and the ecstasy to come.

Shaken and chilled

These are Nescafé canned coffee drinks, a vending machine favourite at my school, especially since the taste was shifted from chemical towards natural. So according to info in the Sunday Times today, 2 cans of these lined up end to end make up the approximate weight and length of a 24-week-old foetus, which is the oldest you can allow one to grow before you cannot abort it under Singapore law. To abort a foetus 6 months old, you induce delivery — then I suppose you wait for it to die. I’m sorry, but I’m not too sure what the medical term for this is. And how it works out for bioethics that current medical technology can actually prevent the death now. And also why it takes 6 months to decide whether you want a baby or not — financial and social reasons far outweigh medical ones. And why not just wait 3 months more to let a family adopt it? Live and learn, I guess, as in the case of a girl who had 11 abortions in her teens, because she’d honestly believed it was a form of contraception. Don’t worry, it turns out she has a womb of steel — married with two children at the time I heard her story.

Some facts about abortion in Singapore from the article today:

• Average of 12,000 a year for the past 10 years
• In 2011,
  • 70% of abortions were undergone by Singaporeans, 30% by foreigners
  • 44.1% by secondary/’O'-level/ITE grads, 36.3% by university/polytechnic grads
• No parental consent required if you are unmarried and below 16 — the gahmen will take care of you (I’m thinking this is in case incest is involved?)
• No pre-abortion counselling or 48-hour waiting period if you are a:
  • foreigner, or
  • a rape victim, or
  • a Singaporean with 3+ children, or 
  • you didn’t pass your PSLE (eugenics, much?!)
• Pre-abortion counselling includes a video, some pamphlets, and waiting for 48 hours before signing your name on a form, but only if you are a:
  • citizen/PR, and
  • passed your PSLE, and
  • have some secondary schooling, and
  • have no more than 2 children

I am probably sounding quite callous now about the possible whys and wherefores of unwanted pregnancies. But consider this — a fiery wise man once lamented to me that the church can decry abortion all it wants, but even if the streets were running red with the blood of babes, we would be nothing less than hypocrites if that’s all we end up doing — agitate against abortion. Where are the resources not only to counsel and prevent before the act, but also to encourage and provide ever after, especially if the mother is a single teen? Where’s the lifelong walk to go with the prime-time talk? Let’s be better than armchair critics, all wrapped up in ‘feelings’. If you know me in person, and want to be and do more in this sphere, come and have a chat sometime soon — I have a lobang or two for you.

Sign, the consent’s form

No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.
— From An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor

It is a terrible first-world problem to have — to be lost in fixation on that one more book (or album or movie) that will ‘complete’ my library; to be sold to the madness of equating the purchase of a book with the possession of (or by) it; to be given over to the wild comfort of life among stacks teeming with stuff.

Enough. Be present. Right where my nose is between the pages (or pressed against the screen). And think. And write. And dream.

Someone has said

“The true prophet, when he speaks, remains silent.” (Philo of Alexandria, Quis rerum, 266, in Les oeuvres de Philon d’Alexandre, vol. 15, Paris 1966, p. 300)

The prophet is silent because, at that moment, it is not he who speaks, but another. God says to his prophets, poor sinful human creatures, “You shall be as my own mouth” (cf. Jeremiah 15:19), and the thought of it makes his messenger tremble.

Of course, this doesn’t happen at the same level of intensity all the way through; there are special moments. God needs only one phrase, one word. The speaker and the listeners have the feeling that drops of fire mingle at a certain point with the preacher’s words and they become white-hot and shining. Of all images, fire is the one that is least inadequate when it comes to expressing this operation of the Spirit.

— “Faith Which Overcomes the World” by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa